Yawning Angel

Cheers everyone! Hoping the wind dies down before this group vanishes over the hill 🙂

Thank you! I'm amazed that this sort of thing can be done as 'backyard' astrophotography. The computer chewed on the files over night - I off load them to a NAS so the capture PC drive doesn't fill, so stacking speed is further limited by network speed Must get a faster PC this year with plenty of solid state space

2hrs 14mins of gentle simmering. 161 x 2.25gb (1000 frames each)

4 panel mosaic around AR12993, AR12994, AR12995 and AR12996 2 panel limb composited in. Daystar Quark etc

Thank you!

Thank you Nicolàs. It's an APM 107/700mm with a Daystar Quark and Altair Hypercam 174m. 5ms exposures at 125fps

Thank you! Cheers! I keep watching it myself...what a thing to be able to 'see' from a back garden!

Captured this morning, before the haze rolled in. A little variation in illumination due to passing cloud 87 frames, from 1000 frame stacks shot every 120 sec. Animated gif at 30fps, bouncing forwards and backward to highlight the solar disk rotation Aligned with "Dave's Video Stabiliser", which is awesome (but can't be downloaded any more😪)

Yikes! I rarely go over 2000. I've 90 x 1000 frames crawling through AS!3 at the moment.

Lovely images Neil! How many frames did you grab to end up with a 300gb file?!

Thank you! Good idea about merging them. I've tried to keep the spot detail from the WL, along with some surface

Interesting to see that the Quark is a reasonable white light filter when unpowered:

This is a really active region!

Alternate processing in Registax / Photoshop:

2 panel white light mosaic, Altair Herschel wedge / asi178mm @ 700mm Coloured and sharpened in PixInsight, Mosaic'd in Photoshop

and colourised...

Any time you like, I'm doing this and hiding from the family to spare them 🙂

Had a bit more of a twiddle with it, and created a rough flat for the centre

That's fine Neil, PM away 🙂 I think PS + Lightroom as a sub is £10 per month, give or take. There are older versions for a one off cost...but some of the newer automatic features might be missing It looks great quality as it is. Maybe some flats might help with the illumination, but they can be tricky with so much sensor coverage I made no real effort to match up the colour, I just let PS do it's thing. I think trimming some of the overlap in the centre might help, so that the more even layers have priority I'm confined to my office for the day, with the dreaded C word - so I'll have a play 🙂

Always game for a mosaic processing battle, so thank you for the data! Photoshop said 'No, nope not gonna do that automatically!', so this is a by hand alignment using layers set to 'Difference' then blended with 'Blend Layers'

Thank you Pete!

I had this interruption: 2022-04-13-2131_4_5_pipp.mp4

Thank you! My process, for this one: Make sure the camera to square to the scope axis! Firstly I try to get the exposure right using a bright area. Having be caught out in the past by starting in the shadows then blowing out all the bright craters Capture by eye, trying to maintain 1/3 to 1/4 overlap. Recapture anything the look odd - bird overfly, airplane, clouds etc. Had one of each in this capture set Batch stack the frames with good coverage, manually stack the edge / corner frames (20% in this case) Batch process in Pi: Crop 10 pixels off each side, Deconvolute then a tiny Wavelet sharpen and denoise Batch Curves, enough to bring up the darker panels and make ICE's job easier MS ICE for the mosaic, export as TIF Into PS then mask off the background and curves to remove any stacking artefacts. Blend in with a layer mask Adobe Camera Raw for a little extra 'Texture' ...and done 🙂

After months and months of resistance I finally mounted my C8 rather than the 700mm frac for some 'proper' lunar work. I've always had a love / hate relationship with this scope: Love the focal length, hate the softness Rather than give in, I did what any astro-imager would do and bought more kit! Electronic collimator and a steeltrack focuser. Then, because I like to punish myself, I tested it with a lunar mosaic... 13/04/22: Celestron C8, asi178mm, 642BP filter. 31 stacks of 500 each, 93gb of SER files boiled down to a 37mb 9455x10653 .PNG image Stacked in AS!3, then Deconvolution, Wavelets and Curves in PixInsight. Background cleanup and format conversion in Photoshop Click, and wait, for the full size (sorry) The tifs ready and waiting Much happier with the C8. It can stay 🙂